Magic Show

I love magic right up until the moment when I learn how the trick was done. The solutions are always so much less interesting than the mystery: So the ball was in his other hand the whole time? Bleh. Boring. What was, only a moment ago, an impossibility, has now been reduced to a banality. Which is pretty much how I feel about today’s eclipse.

One can certainly imagine the terror and awe ancient peoples must have felt when, every now and again, the sun went bye-bye. Eclipses were said to bring with them the baddest of jujus. When the gods remove the entire f-ing sun, somebody’s in big trouble.

An eclipse could also be a force for good.

Famously, the years-long war between the kingdoms of Medes and Lydia ended after an eclipse occurred during a battle, freaking out both armies so much that they laid down their weapons and made peace. They probably figured it was better to make common cause with your earthly enemies than risk the wrath of the gods.

If only our own leaders had quite so many smarts.

It was the ancient Greek philosopher Anaxagoras who intuited the true cause of eclipses, first piecing together that moonlight is reflected sunlight – “it is the sun that puts brightness into the moon” – before putting together the reasons behind lunar cycles and eclipses.

Another Greek, Thedes, was the first to predict when a solar eclipse would occur; in fact, the first eclipse he predicted was the same one that ended the war between Medes and Lydia.

We’ve known what causes eclipses for over three thousand years; we’ve been able to predict them for about the same length of time. We know who, what, when, why, and how eclipses happen: the moon passes directly in front of the sun, causing the sun to “disappear” for a few moments. It’s an illusion no more complicated than pretending to pull your thumb off one hand with the other.

Cool but ultimately not that interesting.

So why do some people still attach so much meaning to these events? The eclipse is said to be represent everything from transition to rebirth to the sun’s death to heralding a new epoch of human understanding. Mostly, though, it’s an excuse for people to travel to Arkansas.

The governor of that state, the unrepentant Trump mouthpiece Sarah Huckabee Sanders, has declared a state of emergency in that state ahead of today’s astronomical event. One could be forgiven into believing that Sanders was hedging against God striking her dead for propping up her former boss, but the simpler explanation is the correct one: she’s worried that the influx of visitors into her state will cause various disruptions and is declaring the state of emergency to release state money to help deal with any contingencies. I suppose she’s correct to be concerned – after all, it’s got to be very strange for her to have people show up in Arkansas by choice.

Here in Savannah, where we will only get a partial eclipse, nothing much is being planned. I suppose most folks will look up at the appointed time, observe some minor occlusion, and then continue their day drinking.

I love science. I love that humans have devised systems to explain the world to ourselves. We use these systems to turn observations or inferences into hypotheses, which lead to experiments and predictions. I love that our big brains can break down the natural world into its component parts, study those parts, and reassemble their constituent parts into a whole.

Is it a horrible pun to say that science has reduced the eclipse to a shadow of itself?

Science is a huge bummer when it robs us of mystery. As a species, we’re like the kid at the magic show who racks her brain, but cannot figure out how the magician disappeared all that milk into the newspaper cone. Where did it go? How is such a thing possible? Could it be… magic?

Our world holds less and less magic. Most of us have long ago given up belief in the supernatural. We may profess a belief in God, for example, but would deny a miracle even if it happened to us. We would, instead, seek a rational explanation. And, most likely, we would find one.

Is that good or bad?

Do we lose something important about being human when we lose our capacity to believe in miracles? Or is our innate desire to find explanations for the natural world, the very thing that kills miracles, also the very thing that makes us human? Is it both? Can we hold both mystery and materialism in equal measure? Is that why all those people are fanning out across the country to witness a silhouette?

Personally, the longer I spend time in this life, the more interested I am in the unknown and the unknowable. Explanations no longer hold my attention, only questions. Why is it this way, not that? What’s out there that we not only do not understand but do not even know exists? Where does wonder even come from, and why? It’s heartening to me that the more we learn, the more questions we find, and the deeper those questions reach. If I have one wish for humanity, it’s that the questions always outnumber the answers.

Enjoy the magic show.

Bonus: Look how disappointing this is.